If You Leave
by Chelsea Oz
Summary: For Miss ScoutFinches! A one shot about how Scout deals with WW2 and how it helps shape the future for her family and also her relationships with her friends, Hank and Dill.


I remembered hearing about Adolf Hitler back in 1935 right after Tom Robinson's trial. Already disillusioned with the human race, I was sickened but not shocked to hear of Germany's prejudice of their Jewish people. A new and unsettling realization that everywhere you go there was someone to hate swam through my veins and they kept swimming as the years went by and then they invaded Poland, then France, then Britain. The side news about Italy and Japan never helped anyone's nerves. I would just sit by Atticus and grumble along with him to the evening news that seemed to get more and more intense with each passing day. Jem seemed to do everything he could to avoid listening to the news. Deep down I think he was scared to death; scared that something so explosive, something so horrific could send us into war with the rest of them. I was scared for him because he was of age to go and I would rather die than see him off to war.

1941 saw him and our dear friend, Hank, off to their sophmore year of college and me in my sophmore year of high school. Jem went to school thanks to a football scholarship and Hank enrolled into the army so they could help him pay for school. I could have punched him in the face for doing that to me but he swore it was the only way he could go to college without completely killing himself with work.

"What if you do have to go to war?" I asked him one day while we were alone.

"Then I will go," he replied, cool as can be.

"Just like that? You won't be scared?"

"If I can't make a name for myself in law school then maybe I can make one for myself as a war hero," came his reply with dreamy eyes.

"You fucking fool," I said with so much digust I could have spit. "What if the only name you make for yourself is in the obituaries when they fly your dead ass home?"

"I will make a name for myself by making Jean Louise cry over a man. Nobody's ever done that before," he said with a shit-eating smirk.

I could only give him a shit-eating smirk back: he was wrong. I cried over Dill Harris. Dill's mother moved to New York a year after Tom's trial and she took Dill with her. Dill would not be back for summers anymore and I spent that whole summer crying myself to sleep. If Jem or Atticus knew they never mentioned it. We write each other letters sometimes but letters aren't a good subsitute for a real living person. Time had softened the pain just as it was supposed to do, though and I've come to accept it.

December 7th of that year only proved to me that time does not always work that way. The day that everyone liked to think was unthinkable had happened: the Japanese sneaked attacked us. I prayed that I was sleeping and having a bad dream just as I'm sure everyone else had but all the praying in the world couldn't have helped us then. We were mercifulessly thrown into war and every boy 18 and up seemed to be going to sign up to go off to war. Hank was one of the first in our county to go which was no surprise seeing as he was already enrolled in the army. Uncle Jack Finch worked as a physician in our county's draft ward and when he gave Jem a 4-F, Jem threw a fit. He didn't understand why he could play football but couldn't go to war.

"You're mother had a history of heart failure, Jem," Uncle Jack explained. "That war will bring on heart problems more than a ball and a field could."

"You know how many blows and tackles I've taken?" Jem asked.

"And I was worried sick about you for years about that. I can't believe Dr. Reynolds ever agreed to let you play knowing what happened to your mother."

"I'm not my mother," Jem said, defiantely.

"You're half your mother and that's a good enough reason as far as I'm concerned."

That's what Uncle Jack told us that night at dinner and me and Atticus couldn't have been more thankful to him. At the time I didn't think he could have had my mother's heart disease but I was just happy to know that he wouldn't have to go to war. Uncle Jack was upset that Jem seemed to hate him now but Atticus assured him that he would come back around and in due time he did.

A few years later, in the fall of 1943, I was shaking in my boots as I read a letter from Dill. He wrote me a thank-you note for the birthday card and money I mailed him and then he promptly informed me that he was going off to war as well. That was like a punch in the stomach to me. It hit me how okay I was when Hank left; it was almost too easy to let him go. The idea of my sweet friend who proposed marriage to me, explored the (un)twisted world of Arthur Radley with me, and went through the hell of Tom Robinson's trial with me, was going off to fight the worst war in the history of mankind was unfathomable to me. I grieved for Dill all over again and woe unto me if Hank knew.

!945 was the best year of my life to that date: the war was over and both my boys made it out okay. Hank came off that train and I felt a sense of pride that I had never felt before. He picked me up, spun me around, and kissed me square on the mouth. The butterflies in my stomach fluttered with a vengence. That night I had rushed home to write Dill a welcome home letter and told him that I was proud of him and I loved him. I never got a letter back until Christmas Eve of that year letting me know that he was in France and that Europe was his home now. He told me that he loved me too and he thanked me for still being so supportive of him but that did little to comfort me. In the middle of the night I took the letter, tore it up and threw it in the fire. I was done grieving for him.


End file.
